It's not my responsibility to maintain your servers. I'll adblock if I want to, and if you try to detect my use of adblock, I'll either get around it or use a different site. I understand that maintaining a website costs money, but I'm under no obligation to help you maintain it. You chose to host the site, it's your job to find a way to pay for it. Blaming your users for your failure to find an acceptable way to profit from your content is stupid.

My personal favorite ways people have come up with to help cover their server costs are merchandise shops (with inflated prices) and donation links (where donations don't confer any benefit to the donor). Those two things are voluntary on the part of the user and they don't distract from the content of the page to any significant degree. If people want some sort of return on their money, the merchandise shop is there; if they don't, they can straight-up donate through the donation link. Neither affects anything inside the website/game server/whatever. It's perfect.

Advertisements are tolerable as long as they're unobtrusive and don't try to get around adblocking rules. Better, have an option to disable advertisements for people who have contributed significantly to the community (ala Slashdot).

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - H. L. Mencken, unsourced

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"- Isaac Asimov, Column in Newsweek (21 January 1980) [source]